Studies on Racial Classification in Latin America

Abstract

Racism, rooted in colonization and slavery, has created the idea of defining and dividing human populations by “races,” such as African, Indigenous, European and Asian. Throughout the Americas, race has commonly been used to make social distinctions, especially regarding persons of African origin. Yet racial classification has distinct manifestations in Latin America compared to the United States. The central question in this chapter is who is black or Afrodescendant in Latin America? While the United States had one-drop or hypodescent rules about racial origin until the 1960s, scholars have documented the general absence of institutional racial classification systems in Latin American countries, resulting in blurred or ambiguous boundaries around racial categories and allowing people to move in and out of them (Degler 1971, Wright 1990, Wade 1993, Telles 2004). Instead, racial classification in Latin American countries is based primarily on appearance, especially skin color, rather than origin and it commonly uses intermediate or mixed-race categories, which the United States has rarely used since the 1920s (Nogueira 1955, Nobles 2000). This has generally resulted in a color continuum in Latin America rather than the system of discrete white and black categories in the United States, where a sharp white boundary has its origins in racial segregation laws which required sharply defining who was black.